—Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O’Molloy said
to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal
hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it.
She was a nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee
interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to
ask him about planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have
been pulling A. E.’s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale,
Magennis.
Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say
about me? Don’t ask.
—No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.
Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I
ever heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical
society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had
spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days),
advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.
He turned towards Myles Crawford and said:
—You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his
discourse.
—He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O’Molloy said, rumour has it, on
the Trinity college estates commission.
—He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child’s
frock. Go on. Well?
—It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator,
full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction I will
not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man’s contumely
upon the new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak,
therefore worthless.
He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an
outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and
ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new
focus.